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One of the attractions of Gibson’s concept of ecological perception is that it seems to provide a basic awareness of the bodily self that can serve as the core of a comprehensive account of full-fledged self-consciousness in thought and action. On the ecological understanding of perception, sensitivity to self-specifying information is built into the very structure of perception in such a way that, as Gibson famously put it, all perception involves co-perception of the (bodily) self and the environment. This paper shows how Gibson’s ecological account is not itself sufficient for self-awareness, even of a primitive form, but suggests what needs to be added to it in order to yield the basic awareness of the bodily self that I term possessing a nonconceptual point of view.

We can think about the sources of self-consciousness in either a genetic or an epistemic sense. That is, we can think either about the origins of the capacity to think self-conscious thoughts or about the warrant that we have for our self-conscious judgments. These two sets of questions are independent but related. This paper explores the role that the genetic dimension of self-consciousness plays in understanding the epistemology of self-consciousness. I will take as my foil a recent account of some key features of the epistemic dimension of a particular type of self-conscious judgment – the account offered by Christopher Peacocke in his book Being Known (Peacocke 1999). Working through the example of how the bodily self is represented in visual perception shows how the primitive foundations from which self-consciousness emerges in the course of cognitive development are also the foundation for the epistemic status of full-fledged self-conscious thoughts.

Two ideas have played a prominent role in philosophical discussions of self-knowledge. The first is the idea that we enjoy introspective ways of finding out about ourselves are fundamentally different from our ways of finding out about ordinary physical objects and other psychological subjects. The second is the idea (Hume’s elusiveness thesis) that when we find out about our own properties through introspection we are not acquainted with any object whose properties they are. It is natural to think that these two ideas are related – and, in particular, that it is (at least partly) because we do not encounter the self as an object in introspection that the knowledge of the self gained through introspection is epistemically privileged. This paper explores this idea in the context of awareness of one’s own body in proprioception and in ordinary perceptual awareness.